Oooh… now my co-workers are speculating about my sex life. So much for my plan to keep a low profile—I’m about as visible now as a fireworks show on top of Mount Kilimanjaro. I stand there staring at them like I’ve never heard of kissing, tugging my oversized flannel shirt tighter around me. It’s big enough that I could use it as a tent. Or a turtle shell. If I were super smart, I’d pull my head inside the flannel and not come out for another century or two.
“A hot kiss for a hotshot,” another whoops.
We’re an equal opportunity camp: if men think about sex constantly, so do the women. Even me. I devote plenty of mental time to kissing. First kisses, dirty kisses, kisses with tongue, butterfly kisses… don’t make me pick between them. I’m an “E—All of the above” woman when it comes to choosing my favorite. Rough kisses, soft pecks, Eskimo kisses, French kisses—yes, yes, and yes please. Really, even bad kisses aren’t all bad because you can share a good laugh with your fellow kissee about whatever it is that went wrong.
So other than the sad fact that I need to not draw attention to myself, I don’t have any problem with my boss’s demand that I kiss a hotshot. I’m happy to take one for the team and add to the photo gallery I’m keeping in my head. You thought only guys stored up spank bank material? Think again. Last night over s’mores and before the piñata-smashing main event, my friend Lola suggested we rename the spank bank.
Rub club.
Jill till.
The flick file.
I’ve stored up my favorite kisses over the years, and yes, I re-run them in my head when it’s time for a little ménage a moi. I may have a kissing addiction, if we’re being honest. I’ve got an entire highlights reel of best-ever kiss moments stored up in my head. I’ve been accused—with some grounds—of preferring the warm up kisses to the main act. Some people make an entire meal out of appetizers and skip the main course. I’m done apologizing for liking what I like—and so if I prefer tongue action to sausage action, so be it.
At the moment, however, I’m on a kissing hiatus. I may just possibly have kissed the wrong guy a little bit too much, resulting in my presence in this fire camp in Nowheresville, California. A girl has to kiss a lot of frogs to find her prince, and my last frog was a warty one with nary a crown in sight. I got no magic fairy tale ending where he morphed into Mr. Tall, Dark, and Regally Handsome in order to sweep me off my feet in his private Learjet to some obscure but filthy rich European country. I was the happy recipient of no tiara, no happily-ever-after, and no super-talented dick. Instead, I’ve ended up with life on the lam and a minimum wage job that requires me to both cook and do the dishes.
The cafeteria I’m standing in used to be a mess hall back in Civilian Conservation Corps days, a period that I’ll put in the category of long, long ago. The building is still largely utilitarian, but the words dilapidated, rundown, and on its last legs also come to mind because the decorating style runs to worn linoleum and fuzzed-out screens. The cooks prop the screen door open with a rock. It definitely isn’t the Ritz, with its wooden picnic tables dotting the surrounding clearing for the overflow crowd.
And it’s certainly no dating Mecca.
Not that I’m interested in dating.
Or guys.
Sex and anything to do with the penis-possessing members of society are strictly off-limits, see the aforementioned plan of flying under the radar and sticking to the spank bank. I’m supposed to be hiding, not drawing attention to myself.
“I can’t just kiss the first guy I see.” My mouth protests, on auto-pilot while my libido considers the option. Seriously. The Big Bear Rogues light fires that have nothing to do with the trees and protecting the wildland interface. I secretly suspect that the nineteen men and one woman (go, sister!) who make up the elite team of wildland firefighters were hired as much for their pretty faces as for their fierce firefighting skills. Or maybe it’s the combination of a big, rough lumberjack of a man who’s bulked up even more by long weeks hauling a fuck-ton of equipment around the wild. Hell, I’d interface with Pick Revere, one of the hotshot team’s two seconds-in-command, any day of the week and twice on Sunday. We’ve only met once, much earlier in the summer before I started working here, but it was memorable. Even if he did accidentally scare the hell out of me, how do you forget that much man?